Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Lever - Shanker

Made it to the HD dealer Monday and picked up the bushings for the clutch lever. They were a rather princely $4.00 each but the dealer had them and now the clutch installation is complete. Next up is working on the rear wheel. Looks like we're going to be having some crappy weather the remainder of the week - good time to get in the shop and do some things.

On the education front, the weekend Wall Street Journal had an essay by Joel Klein: A Lesson Plan For A+ Teachers. It's adapted from Klein's new book Lessons of Hope: How to Fix Our Schools. He presents some excellent ideas but what I found striking was the credit he gave to Albert Shanker for many of the ideas.

Shanker was the president of the American Federation of Teachers during the first half of my high school teaching career. He showed up to make a presentation for some program that as far as I know never came to fruition, but from what I remember it was the school administration that dropped the ball on that. Anyway, he was an excellent speaker and I was very impressed with his presentation. He was also a prolific writer and an early champion of charter schools, as unlikely as that seems. I always preferred being in the AFT rather than the NEA. I'm sure a lot of that had to do with Shanker's leadership.

I'll have to seek out a copy of Klein's book. For those of you unfamiliar with Mr. Klein, he was the schools chancellor in New York City, so he's been around education. I'm always interested in what anyone has to say when they have a prescription to fix the schools. Some of them, like Diane Ravich, Doug Stowe and Ken Robinson actually do have good ideas and workable solutions. Looks like Mr. Klein with a little help from Albert Shanker does also.